WoW.com reports that Blizzard account administrators are being instructed by their managers to avoid restoring World of Warcraft characters for players whose accounts have been looted by gold sellers, keyloggers, and other nefarious elements from the MMO underworld. They attribute this information to a veteran account administrator who tells them admins are being told to offer ripped-off players a "care package" consisting of 2,500 gold, two Emblems of Frost, and 10 Emblems of Triumph for every day the players had to wait to receive the package. Word is if players accept the package, the incident is closed, and no other measures are taken, while if it is refused, "they are then forced to go into a character restoration queue that is consistently several days to weeks long." This is described as a measure meant to reduce the workload of employees who perform account restorations, and they note: "Similar policies have existed at other times account compromises have been high, such as during the transition from Vanilla WoW to The Burning Crusade." This ties back to an earlier report they made saying "trusted sources close to the situation" inform them Blizzard is giving serious consideration to making hardware authenticators mandatory on all WoW accounts to reduce the number of accounts compromised in the game. They say: "According to our sources, while this policy has not been implemented yet and the details are not finalized, it is a virtually forgone conclusion that it will happen."

Please note: Shipping fees have been waived on this product to reduce the cost to the consumer, and the new price for each Authenticator has been adjusted to cover the new lower shipping cost (6.99€ / 6.29 GBP per unit).

They mention the shipping fees are waived for the US and other region authenticators as well, but don't go as in depth on the fact that the cost of the authenticator has shipping built-in, hence the $6 fee.